Short sighted

During my time off last week I went to see the new James Bond flick, Casino Royale. Overall, I liked it. I liked Daniel Craig as Bond, and I liked the back-to-basics approach. Then again, I’m probably one of the few people who liked Timothy Dalton’s Bond, too.

With that said, I’ll leave the merits and pitfalls to the reviewers. The movie, however, comes up short — no pun intended — in its understanding of the markets.

In the film, Bond is tracking a network that finances international terrorism. At the start, one of the terror financiers calls his broker and tells him to sell the stock of an airline manufacturer.

We later learn of a plot to blow up the company’s newest model jumbo jet as it’s rolled out at, oddly enough, the Miami airport.

Presumably, the financier wanted to sell the stock to avoid a loss, but it’s unlikely that an attack against one unoccupied plane would have much affect on the jet-maker’s stock price. Even if it had, selling only protected the financier from a loss. It wouldn’t have produced a gain, as the movie seems to imply. And if the guy owned the stock, why would he want to blow up one of the company’s planes anyway? Why not concoct a scheme to drive the share price higher?

Later, Bond’s boss, M, hints that the financier may actually have been shorting the stock. Intelligence groups, she said, noticed a surge in short-selling of airline stocks on Sept. 12, 2001, the day after the terror attacks in the U.S.

The U.S. markets, though, were closed the day after the attacks, and many foreign markets don’t allow short selling.

More importantly, even if terrorists could have shorted the stock on 9/12, it still wouldn’t have been the financial boon that the movie implies.

To manipulate the markets, the financiers would have had to short the stocks before 9/11. But if they’d done that, they probably wouldn’t have shorted airlines. There were other blue-chip stocks that would have made better short plays under the circumstances.

I know, it’s only a movie. For all I know, they fudged the poker scenes, too.

A few days ago, there was a special on a cable TV channel about the Bond films. It included film clips and parts of interviews with actors, critics, etc. One producer who had worked on some of the films said, he once told Cubby Broccoli that he had figured out how they worked. First, shoot the movies in glamorous locations, where people would want to go on their honeymoons. Next, make sure the action moves fast enough that nobody notices how weak the plot is. He said that Cubby agreed with him.

At IMDB.com, one guy complained that after Bond jumps in the water, it was impossible for the cell phone he was carrying to work properly. I guess everything else in the movie was absolutely believable!? (But it was fun)